Classmate PC gets a boost with million-unit Venezuelan order

The government of Venezuela has ordered one million low-cost Classmate PC …

The government of Venezuela has announced plans to order more than one million Classmate PC laptops from Portugal as part of a broad economic agreement between the two countries. The government of Venezuela aims to boost technical literacy by distributing the computers to schools.

The Classmate PC is a low-cost portable computing reference design that was developed by Intel, and it uses the company's energy-efficient mobile processors. It targets the education market in developing countries and is intended to serve as a learning tool for young students. Intel recently secured a deal with the government of Portugal, which will be manufacturing 500,000 of its own Classmate PC units based on Intel's design. Portugal has now also agreed to produce an additional million units to sell to Venezuela.

OLPC might be making a comeback, however, and it announced a pilot program with Peru in early September after controversially transitioning the XO Laptop to Microsoft's Windows XP operating system. The Classmate PC units that will be distributed to schools in Venezuela and Portugal will ship preinstalled with a custom flavor of the Linux operating system.

The government of Venezuela has a long history of commitment to Linux and open source software. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez enthusiastically endorsed open source last year when the country launched the Bolivarian Computer initiative, a government-sponsored project that facilitated mass production of a budget Linux computer that was sold to the general public at low cost. The flexibility and low cost of Linux have helped make South America, in the words of a Brazilian technology minister, a "continent of open source."

The specific price that Venezuela is paying for the Classmate PC units hasn't been publicly disclosed, but the country's much broader deal with Portugal is said to weigh in at over $3 billion. In addition to the laptops, Portugal is also providing Venezuela with telecommunications infrastructure as part of the agreement.

The success of the Classmate PC has compelled Intel to reinvent the hardware and push forward with a new version. The improved design, inspired by extensive ethnographic research conducted by Intel in countries that have adopted Classmate PCs, will emphasize "micromobility" with a new touchscreen tablet mode that supports finger interaction and a stylus.